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Visualization of Nonlinear Vector Field Topology IV

Summary

Fluid flows, especially of air and water, play an essential role in mechanical engineering and other disciplines. Besides physical experiments, numerical simulation is used in most applications. Scientific visualization maps the numerical results into computer graphics to simplify the evaluation of the simulation by engineers and researchers. Good numerical methods allow for error bounds, but an exact calculation of values is usually impossible. Since topological methods are sensible to small errors, a part of the project deals with more robust topological analysis of computational fluid dynamics data, so that inprecise data allows robust analysis and visualization of the topological flow structure. The second part of the project aims at a better visualization of important spatial vortex structures and the robust detection of attachment and separation structures. The previous projects (Visualization of nonlinear vector field topology I-III) have shown that stream surfaces can help with the visualization of these important phenomena, so we intend to improve our stream surface algorithm with respect to precision and graphical representation.